


second glass of wine

by emei



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Ghost Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-01
Updated: 2006-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emei/pseuds/emei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva McGonagall is young and lonely, and so is Moaning Myrtle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	second glass of wine

Minerva was in her seventh year during the year of the attacks. The year the Chamber of Secrets opened. She remembers polishing her head girl badge until it shone, brandishing it like a shield. It meant authority, rules and safety and normality. Professor Dumbledore stood for another kind of normality in his own unpredictable way. He offered her sweets and kind words when she came to him for advice about what to do with the homesick first-years. (Minerva much preferred the words to the sweets, but you couldn’t have one without the other, she supposed.)

She tried to forget how it ended though, tried to push her memories of panic and hysterically sobbing students and Headmaster Dippet’s whispered words about scandals and honour and propriety to the back of her mind. She drowned them in other memories, covered them with layers of last minute studying, evenings in common rooms with smuggled firewhiskey and hazy adieus.

It worked, for a while. She got herself a job in a small business of Diagon Alley, transfiguring odd knick-knacks into things to sell to the Muggles. (It was a hard time, sparse in material things and even sparser in hope.) Minerva tried to keep her head down because really, that was the only sensible thing to do for a young witch straight out of school, but when she read the reports on Grindelwald’s progress her heart grew heavier and her day job seemed more meaningless each day. 

Grindelwald was defeated and Dumbledore was acknowledged as a hero, and colour seemed to return to the world ever so slowly.

There was a grey barn owl sitting in the window when Minerva got up one morning, with a letter tied to its leg. She untied the knot and when she turned the letter over in her hands she saw that the heavy parchment was sealed with the Hogwarts crest. She carefully opened the letter without destroying the seal, and smiled.

The castle was intimidating and welcoming at the same time as only Hogwarts could be, and this time no one was restricting her explorations. She was very careful to make sure that the students understood that the fact that their new Transfigurations teacher was one of the youngest in a century did not mean that there were no rules to obey. A few well-placed detentions in each class taught the lesson remarkably quickly, she found.  
However, as much as she loved the castle and the teaching, her evenings grew long and lonely.

*

Myrtle spent a couple of horrid weeks alone in her bathroom after being forbidden to haunt Olive Hornby. Revenge, after all, was the sweet heady sensation filling her veins instead of the blood that she no longer had. The abstinence was nerve-wracking, and she wailed and sobbed and splashed water around trying to feel something, anything, at all. Soon, no one came into her bathroom to gossip and point fingers and laugh at her behind her back any longer.  
The relief was empty and the loneliness bigger than ever.

The discovery that she could travel through the pipes to all the bathrooms in the castle improved things a lot, Myrtle found. The Prefects’ Bathroom had the best tub and good places to pop out from, and she kept doing it over and over for a while. She would hide in a corner, and keep watch as all the prefects came to take their baths. All the smooth skin and wet hair and breasts and content sighs made her feel again, something close to heat rushing through her transparent body.  She was only awake for those moments, almost like living in a way she could not quite remember, and it was heavenly. But the painted mermaids tired her. Giggling behind her back and pointing fingers, they were, and she went searching for new places. Eventually she found the teachers’ private bathrooms and that was even better.

Yes, those were something special. Because in one of the bathrooms, Minerva McGonagall had taken to spending the longest of her evenings. It seemed like she was trying to drown her loneliness in glasses of red wine and hot foamy baths. Myrtle knew that splashing water wouldn’t help much, but she couldn’t stop either, so she understood. Soon she became very fond of the way Minerva would look halfway into her second glass of wine on Friday nights. Her head would drop back, and her eyes would glimmer _just so_ before they fell closed.

One dull Friday when none of her usual hideouts had any appeal at all, Myrtle decided that she was tired of only watching. When the glass in Minerva’s hands was half-empty for the second time, Myrtle made her move. She glided through the water, closed her eyes and pressed herself against Minerva’s body. For a short moment, a split second in time she almost felt it. The body heat, the smooth skin… And then she was falling through to the outside of the tub and Minerva opened her eyes from surprise.  
Myrtle had planned on fleeing straight into the pipes, but the clicking sound of glass meeting stone stopped her. She hid behind the towels and kept peeking as Minerva sank deeper into the water. She seemed to be staring at a crack in the wall (and she was shaking, just a little). Her mouth was quivering in a strange half-smile. It was transfixing, and Myrtle felt a sudden intense longing for the next Friday. And the next. And the next…

It did not take very long before Minerva McGonagall closed her eyes as soon as she slid into the water.   



End file.
